Feature

If exuberance were king and wanted to hire a court painter, it couldn’t do better than put Lily van der Stokker on the royal payroll. The artist’s decorative wall paintings and drawings—equal parts age of the Baroque, age of Aquarius, and age of ado-lescence—appear to strive for sheer exuberance as much as Platonic philosophy strives for the ideal. Dynamic lines reminiscent of Bernini, Borromini, and chemistry notebook doodlings, vivid hues reminiscent of early ’70s concert posters, and flowers—lots and lots of flowers—were all in full evidence in Mud Honey and Curlique (both works 1994), the wall paintings that dominated the show. These two works look as though van der Stokker used some inhuman means to create them, as if she took psychedelic clouds—the kind that don’t produce acid rain, just plain acid—and threw them into two opposite corners of the gallery, where they stuck to the wall